by phildini on September 29, 2015

Last week I went to an excellent meetup hosted by Erin McKean of Wordnik on making twitter bots, and now I've got the bot bug. Making bots, these little autonomous pieces of code that exist for some singular purpose, has the highest satisfaction-to-lines-of-code ratio I've ever experienced. This is the most sheer fun I've had writing code in a while, and I'm full of ideas for writing more. Philip's Forest of Bots is currently small, but growing:

Legendary Bot was the first bot I created, at that workshop last week. If you've seen How I Met Your Mother, and heard Barney Stinson say "It's going to LEGEN-wait for it-DARY!", then you know how this bot operates.

SnozzBot was bot number 2, conceived as I walked home from that meetup. Inspired by the original Willy Wonka movie, picture Gene Wilder saying "The snozzberries taste like snozzberries" and this bot will make more sense.

BuddyBot is still a work in progress. After writing the two twitter bots above, I wanted to do something with Slack. BuddyBot sends positive messages to members of my social Slack group, because we could all use more positivity in our day.

This post is just to get these bots out there, more details and resources on building bots to come, thanks for reading.